If the title sounds postmodernist, then I think it is the best thing Postmodernism has contributed to the intellectual development of man. Let me start this post with the poem I recently wrote after reading a collection of American postmodern poems.

Possessed Eyes
 
 
Between glances and stares
When God's angels descend
From dreams to hallucinations,
Their blue is a shy tourmaline
Or a muted lazuli or a topaz,
Dull and meek until December. 

When you blink to the rhythm
Of breaths and excited pulse 
Upon the prodding of the sun
Or the sudden whiff of the wind,
I see the curls like cut threads
Or halved whorls of insect wings.

I wonder what they keep or hide 
From the flash and sheen of light
When you lull and close them:
Nightmares or haunting visions,
The luminous dance of cherubs
Or the long darkness of demons?

Yes, they were just eyes, but they surely made me speak of "shy tourmaline", "insect wings", "dance of cherubs", and "darkness of demons".  From ordinary to strange or familiar to unfamiliar, indeed, was the literary exercise in this one.

Shklovsky, Bakhtin, Derrida wrote extensively on making objects unfamiliar and the practical poetic, subversion or undermining of social hierarchies, and difference and deference in meaning and perception.  Although theirs are substantial and contemporary, I still find Aristotle's Poetics clearer and more interesting.  That "poetic language must appear strange and wonderful" is an idea that acknowledges the process of defamiliarizing.  

Even the ancient Greek scholars thought about it and used it in their rhetorics.  I think the process of defamiliarizing can be used in our study of culture.  I don't mean culture jamming or cultural anarchy where the idea of culture is disrupted and its elements are destroyed.  Maybe we can shift our focus sometimes in framing elements of culture that we oftentimes understand as hierarchical and categorized.  

When I mentioned before that one could study the household economics in our town by checking how women sewed the hemlines of their dresses and skirts, they thought I was kidding.  I must have sounded dumb and strange.  Although I could explain how those women rolled bills and hid them inside the hems of their dresses or skirts, I did not press further since all of us had not yet heard about defamiliarizing culture.

Until today, I still believe anthropologists in the field can get meaningful data from idle talks and gossips, garbage and waste, and small things and ordinary events they tend to ignore or consider insignificant.       

 

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Comment by Keith Hart on June 25, 2012 at 8:57pm

I like the poem a lot, M. I can't help it if I see it as romanticism rather than postmodernism, the darkness that surrounds the light. Writing Culture was often described as postmodern, but the editors described the enterprise as high modernism, cubism more than deconstruction. But that it nitpicking. The idea of ethnography as highlighting what is strange speaks to the alterity strand of anthropology. The Anglos tend to go for making the strange familiar, whereas the French, for example, cultivate the anthropologist's Otherness.

I have a query. I am not sure that the last sentence follows from what preceded it, although I can see a connection.

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